houthi

 

Something unusual is happening in Yemen. The Houthis — a movement whose official slogan includes "Death to America, Death to Israel, Damn the Jews" — are watching Iran take its heaviest blows in history and doing essentially nothing about it.

Why not?

At first I thought it was self-preservation. But Hezbollah, which has the same instinct, went all in, no doubt at Iran's behest. 

The Houthis are saying that they are waiting for the right moment. On March 9th, speaking during his Ramadan lectures, Abdul Malik al-Houthi explained, "Regarding military escalation and action, our fingers are on the trigger, ready to respond at any moment should developments warrant it."  

What is the right moment? For that, we need to understand a basic fact: for Iran, survival is victory. 

Iran's strategic objective right now is not to defeat the United States militarily. It is to survive the campaign with enough institutional continuity, territorial control, and proxy infrastructure to reconstitute its threat posture over time — and to create enough economic and political pressure on the coalition to force a ceasefire before that threat posture is fully dismantled.

The oil weapon is central to that strategy.

The Strait of Hormuz closure has removed approximately 20 million barrels per day from global markets,  roughly one-fifth of global oil consumption. There are partial mitigations available to make up some of this shortfall. Saudi Arabia's East-West Pipeline to Yanbu and the UAE's Habshan-Fujairah pipeline to the Gulf of Oman can together bypass the strait for perhaps 6-9 million bpd under optimal conditions, though drone strikes have already targeted Fujairah infrastructure and a Saudi oil field has been hit. Global spare production capacity outside the Gulf adds perhaps 1.5-3 million bpd. Strategic petroleum reserve draws from the U.S. and IEA members provide perhaps 2-4 million bpd of cushion measured in weeks, not months. U.S.-led naval escorts could restore another 0.5-2 million bpd through carefully batched convoys,  but commercial operators won't return at scale until the route is genuinely safe, not merely escorted, and insurers remain unwilling to write policies. Venezuela can only add about half a million bpd. 

Add all of it up generously, and the world can cover perhaps 10-14 million bpd of the shortfall. The remaining 6-10 million bpd, sustained over weeks and months, will do what oil shocks have always done: drive inflation, strain supply chains, and create political pressure on governments whose populations feel it at the pump. Asia absorbs over 80% of Hormuz oil flows. South Korea, Japan, and India are not parties to this conflict. Their governments will not remain silent indefinitely. And in the United States, Brent crude at $90-100 per barrel will eventually be measured in polling numbers.

This is Iran's path to survival: economic attrition with the world pressuring the US to end the war as soon as possible. 

Yet even the partial mitigation from the Saudi pipeline depends almost entirely on one assumption: that the Red Sea bypass route stays open.

The Houthis control the Bab-el-Mandeb strait at the southern entrance to the Red Sea. They have already demonstrated, over two years of operations, that they can make that corridor effectively impassable to commercial shipping through a sustained campaign of ballistic missiles, anti-ship cruise missiles, and one-way attack drones. During their previous campaign, the Houthis attacked 178 vessels, sinking four ships and killing nine sailors, forcing hundreds of commercial vessels to reroute around South Africa. 

Right now, ships going across the Red Sea to the Suez Canal are still unimpeded. The Saudi pipeline is safe for now. But the Houthis can make the entire Red Sea too dangerous for shipping; insurers would bail as soon as there is one ballistic missile aimed at the Yanbu port that the Saudis use. 

This is Iran's ace in the hole. Closing both the Straits of Hormuz and Bab-el-Mandeb, and harassing the ships already in the Red Sea, is an oil shock that the world cannot absorb now. 

If the Houthis enter now, they do so at the moment of maximum U.S. military attention and maximum carrier strike group presence. They would be struck hard, potentially decisively, while the political and military infrastructure to do so is fully in place. That is a bad trade, not just for the Houthis, but for Iran, which needs them intact for exactly the scenario described above.

The Houthis, kept intact and in reserve, are the instrument designed to execute the most important part of Iran's survival strategy at the critical moment.

The only question is timing. And here is where strategy must be considered more importantly than a literal interpretation of international law. Because there is no reason to wage the war in Iran's timetable. 

The Houthi threat should be addressed now, while the carriers are in place, while the military and political infrastructure to address it is mobilized. Waiting until they shoot their first missile or drone is exactly what Iran wants the US to do - because  Iran controls the timing to stay in power. 

Airstrikes against Houthi military infrastructure — launch sites, missile and drone storage, command and control — conducted now, as part of the broader campaign posture, carry a fraction of the political and operational cost they would carry in four or six weeks, when justifying renewed escalation becomes exponentially harder. The targeting intelligence accumulated during Operation Prosperity Guardian and the August 2025 strikes is there. The assets are in the region. The narrative logic — these are Iran's proxies, this is a single integrated threat network — is defensible and accurate.

The Houthis have already demonstrated their willingness to act against global shipping when Iran requests it. That is not a theoretical future threat — it is an established behavioral pattern with a two-year track record. The question is not whether they will do it, but when Iran decides the moment is optimal.

The Houthis are not acting out of self preservation. Like Hezbollah, they are doing exactly what their Iranian masters tell them to do. Iran needed Hezbollah to open up a second front to Israel at the outset of the war, but they need the Houthis to be wait and maintain their full capabilities. 

Waiting for that moment give Iran control of the most important single variable in the war's political sustainability: the oil price, and with it, the patience of every government in Asia and every voter in America watching their energy bills.

The Houthis are not standing down out of principle. They are being held in reserve as a weapon. The time to address a weapon is before it is fired, not after. 

We know they would use it on request. They already did.

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nadar

 Sarojini Nadar’s Gender, Genocide, Gaza and the Book of Esther was released last year by Routledge. It takes a biblical story that begins with a legally sealed plan to exterminate every Jew in the Persian Empire and reframes it as a story about Jews wantonly killing Persians. 

The interpretive lens is declared from the outset: Gaza. The book assumes Israel is committing genocide. That assumption then becomes the key for rereading Esther. The ancient text is retrofitted to match the contemporary accusation.

The first paragraphs of the book make it obvious that Nadar is shoehorning Esther into her hate for Israel:

As we've noted many times, Netanyahu's invocation of Amalek was in terms of remembering what they did, not annihilating them - two separate commandments. 

The very premise of the book is false, based on a connection made by the author that has no basis in reality. 

The Book of Esther is centered around a royal decree to “destroy, kill, and annihilate” the Jews — men, women, and children — on a single appointed day. The decree is sealed. Persian law does not allow it to be revoked.

That is the existential core of the story.

But in this reading, the moral focus is relocated to the end — to the 75,000 enemies killed when the Jews defend themselves from the would-be genocidaires  That episode is elevated as the defining meaning of Esther. The extermination order against the Jews is a minor point barely mentioned.

In this book, Haman’s defining feature is not his genocidal antisemitism. It is his genealogy. He is an “Agagite,” linked to Amalek — a people once marked for destruction in earlier biblical texts. The Book of Esther definitely makes the link, but not in terms of destroying Amalek but in terms of the irrational hatred of the Jewish people that Amalek represents, both in the Torah and in Esther. 

Any Jewish schoolchild immediately associates Amalek with unmitigated evil. That is Esther's use of "Agagite."  His genocidal desire is based on one fact - that one Jew refuse to bow down to him, just as the Torah emphasizes that Amalek attacked the Israelites for no reason except hate, ambushing the Israelites from the rear where the weakest and slowest were trailing behind, when there was no threat. This is the paradigm of antisemitism. 

Instead of noting that obvious analogy between Haman and Amalek, Nadar creates a completely different analogy -one based on the idea that Jews are always the guilty ones. 

She even dismisses Haman's decree to murder every Jewish man, woman and child as  a "literary exaggeration."

But not Jews trying to survive. That is not exaggeration - that is "genocide." The violence against Haman and his allies is read not primarily as self-defense against extermination, but as Jews enacting a divine mandate to annihilate an ancient enemy. Haman the exterminator becomes Haman the theologically marked victim in her retelling.

The Book of Esther says repeatedly that the Jews struck “those who sought their harm.” It specifies that in Susa, 500 men were killed. It emphasizes three separate times that the Jews did not take plunder — despite being legally allowed to do so.

The narrative does not describe Jews slaughtering Persian civilians indiscriminately. It does not narrate women and children being killed by Jewish forces. It does not present expansion, conquest, or domination. In other words, by no definition can the Jews' self-defensive actions be called genocidal - unless that is how you look at Jews in general. 

Nadar denies any antisemitism. Yet her warped worldview prompts her to she even twist the Biblical account of Amalek itself to try to justify its actions as either self defense or pre-emptive defense of Canaan:

She's just "asking questions." Just like Holocaust deniers, just like Candace Owens. Instead of asking why people have hated Jews irrationally for the past 2,500 years, she asks what the Jews must have done to be hated. 

In Esther, Jews are no longer a threatened minority fighting to live. They are the eternal aggressors. In the Torah, the Israelites are not newly freed slaves who are being led to liberation but an aggressive threat to the presumably peaceful Amalekites. In Gaza, Israel is not a state responding to violence or existential threat. It is the inheritor of a biblical annihilation script.

In all cases, Jewish self-defense becomes morally illegitimate by definition. Any exercise of force, even in response to extermination, is reframed as genocidal intent. And antisemitism, uniquely among all types of hate,  is transformed into something that must be justified, somehow, because otherwise it doesn't make sense. 

Nadar does something similar in her thesis that the Book of Esther connects the sexual  subjugation of the king's harem with the Hebrew word herem, which can mean destruction. The words indeed are etymologically related, both denoting separation, but neither is used in Esther, yet Nadar uses this to connect the misogynistic behavior of a Persian king and the supposedly bloodthirsty Jews- she might as well connect Esther to the Arabic/Muslim word haram, forbidden, which also shares the same root word.

This book is moral inversion masquerading as scholarship. And it judges the Jews of Persia and even the Israelites through the same bigoted lens as it judges the Israeli Jews of today.

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carr

 Harvard’s Carr-Ryan Center for Human Rights Policy is hosting an event this week titled From Apartheid to Democracy: A Blueprint for Peace in Israel-Palestine. The book it features proposes to “end apartheid and occupation rule” and establish a transitional framework leading to democratic decision-making about the territory’s future governance.

Universities should host controversial ideas. Human rights centers, especially, should not be timid. But intellectual seriousness requires clarity about what is being proposed — and what assumptions are being adopted.

The book's premise is that Israel is an apartheid state and that the area from the river to the sea is essentially a one state reality today. The problem isn't the book making these false claims; it is that the Carr Center is treating them as uncontested fact.

The Carr Center’s event description does not say “what the authors describe as apartheid.” It states, flatly, that the goal is to end apartheid and occupation rule. That framing is not neutral. Whether Israel constitutes an apartheid regime is one of the most fiercely debated legal and political claims in international discourse. I have demonstrated many times that the groups making those arguments twist international law for their own political purposes. Treating it as settled fact is itself a substantive position.

More importantly, the proposal being discussed is completely different than how human rights are discussed in the context of any other state. 

Normally, human rights groups either claim that a state is violating international law and demand it complies, or they seek to use existing legal frameworks to change the state's policies from the inside. Human rights advocacy typically demands compliance with international law within existing sovereign frameworks. It rarely proposes immediate regime replacement as the primary remedy.

Yet this is what is being suggested here. Only for Israel, a state that (whether the authors believe it or not) takes human rights and international law very seriously. 

According to the event description, the authors seek to design a transition government, reform laws and institutions, and lay the groundwork for democratic decision-making about the future governance of Israel-Palestine. In practice, that necessarily entails redefining sovereignty, citizenship, and political authority across the entire territory between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea.

Extending equal political rights across the entire territory prior to any final status decision would, as a matter of demographics and constitutional design, transform Israel’s identity as a Jewish-majority nation-state. That is not a marginal reform; it is a foundational restructuring of sovereignty. It would fundamentally alter Israel’s current national identity as a Jewish-majority nation-state. It is not honest to describe it as merely a technical peace plan. It is a proposal to replace the existing political order with a new one, without the approval of the current citizens of Israel, who would have no say on replacing their own government.

That is not democracy.

A human rights center has a special obligation here. Human rights law protects individual equality — but it also recognizes the right of peoples to self-determination. The tension between universal civic equality and national self-determination is one of the most difficult problems in modern political theory. Presenting a blueprint that effectively collapses one side of that tension without acknowledging it is not neutral scholarship.

The event description also frames the problem as Israel “waiting for a perfect partner for peace,” implying unilateral obstruction. It does not acknowledge Palestinian political fragmentation, the history of rejected proposals, Hamas’s continued control of Gaza, or the security collapse that followed Israel’s 2005 disengagement. One may dispute the weight of those factors, but omitting them entirely creates a moral asymmetry that undermines credibility. 

The fact that the Palestinians have rejected their own state, numerous times, since 1947, is ignored, and all those rejections are framed as Israel's fault alone. Yet Palestinian rejectionism was because they never wanted to build their own state where they can have rights, but to destroy another state. This plan fits in very well with that strategy,. It does not allow Jews to have rights, no matter what hand waving the authors claim. It is a warmed over version of Moammar Gaddafi's "Isratine" proposal.

There is another question the event framing does not confront: what prevents a transitional authority from descending into civil conflict? Regime replacement in deeply divided societies is historically volatile. South Africa is often invoked as a comparative case, but the Israeli-Palestinian conflict differs in demography, regional environment, armed non-state actors, and mutual existential fears. A glance at newspapers between 1945 and 1948 shows that Arabs were routinely attacking Jews and some Jewish groups responded in kind. People were murdered daily. That is the real "one state reality" that proponents of plans like this ignore.

If the event were structured as a debate, with explicit acknowledgment of competing interpretations of occupation, apartheid, and  the asymmetry of demanding the overhauls of the only Jewish state where Jews can practice self determination while not demanding the same for any other nation may exemplify academic rigor. 

As currently described, it reads like the Carr Center is accepting the false premises and the only debate is exactly how the Jewish state must be weakened or dismantled.

Beyond that, the book that is being discussed was written by and promoted by members of "Democracy for the Arab World Now."  DAWN  has treated Hamas primarily as a political actor rather than foregrounding its terrorism. A human rights organization that cannot bring itself to criticize Hamas is a peculiar one to be promoted by Harvard University. Beyonf that , DAWN has troubling ties to Islamist groups and its anti-Israel advocacy has no resemblance to fairness or accuracy. One example is its "doxxing" of members of AIPAC by putting their pictures on playing cards, reminiscent of armies who use playing cards so soldiers know who to target. DAWN knows the symbolism and chose to treat American Zionists as if they are war criminals deserving of being targeted for death. Why would the Carr Center even consider promoting a group that does such a thing?

A blueprint for peace is welcome. But clarity about what is being dismantled, what is being built, and whose rights are being recalibrated is not optional. It is the minimum standard for serious human rights scholarship.

As it stands, by accepting the premises of this book in its description, the Carr Center is abandoning the very human rights and democratic frameworks that they claim to uphold. 

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leitner

 The newly published  Palgrave Handbook of Racial Injustice and Resistance is not a fringe publication. Palgrave handbooks are used as sources in university courses. They carry institutional weight. They signal what the academy considers serious scholarship.

So it matters what they say and how they say it.

The first substantive chapter, immediately following the introduction, is by Ronit Lentin, retired professor at Trinity College Dublin. Most academic biographies in the book start off with "he is a professor of..." or "she is a senior lecturer at..." But Lentin's biography starts with "Ronit Lentin is a Jewish anti-Zionist woman." 

The title of this chapter is "Genocide Is Not a Metaphor: Reflections on Gaza and the Denial of the Crime of Genocide." 

That title tells you something. The first words of the article, after several quotes from Palestinians accusing Israel of genocide, are even more telling:  

The Zionist entity responded to the October 7 2023 act of resistance by the Gaza-based Islamic Resistance Movement—Harakat al-Muqawama al-Islamiya, Hamas—by launching a massive air bombardment of the besieged Gaza enclave, followed by a ground offensive. 

If a massive pogrom of murders, burning families, rapes and kidnapping is referred to as an "act of resistance" we can see that we are not going to be reading anything remotely resembling objectivity.  

We can see that Lentin refers to Israel as "the Zionist entity." That alone should be disqualifying for a serious academic press. But within the article we see a far more egregious misuse of both language and a twisting of academic standards. 

Lentin does not refer to the Israel Defense Forces. She refers throughout to the "IGF" — the "Israeli Genocidal Forces." She uses this term deliberately and consistently, embedding the legal conclusion inside the noun so she never has to prove it again. Genocide is no longer a charge to be established — it is an identity, built into the name. Just as in the paper's title, Every subsequent sentence that uses "IGF" inherits that verdict without argument.

In an activist pamphlet, this would be polemical but at least honest about what it is. In a Palgrave academic handbook, it is a pre-verdict dressed as terminology — a rhetorical move that forecloses the analysis it pretends to conduct.

Ask yourself whether Lentin would accept "Palestinian Jihadist Forces" or "Hamas Exterminationist Movement" as neutral academic terminology in a scholarly volume. She cannot even acknowledge Hamas as a terrorist organization — that label, she writes, is merely how 'white Jewish supremacy' frames it — and insists the October 7 attack must be understood as resistance to colonialism (p. 30).

Lentin argues that Zionism is "essentially a race-making ideology and practice" rooted in "European Jewish racial supremacy." This is her axiom, stated in the opening pages and never subsequently argued — only applied. From that premise, everything follows with logical inevitability: Gaza is racialized violence, Israeli military operations are genocidal by definition, and anyone who questions the genocide framing is participating in racial ideology.

Conspiracy theories and closed systems look exactly like this. It is internally coherent and completely unfalsifiable. Counter-evidence does not challenge the framework — it confirms it, as proof of how deep the denial runs.

Lentin is at least partially aware of this exposure. She writes that the chapter "does not deal with the legal implications" of genocide. Rather than modesty, this is insulation. By relocating the debate from international law — where genocide has a specific legal threshold requiring demonstrated intent — to race theory and colonial discourse, she moves onto terrain where legal standards of proof do not apply. Then she uses the word "genocide" as a legal and literal term throughout, even quoting approvingly from scholars who call Gaza "more than genocide." The chapter title insists genocide is not a metaphor, but she has quietly removed the framework that would make it anything other than one.

The author deliberately obscures what happened on October 7 - kidnapping women and children, slaughtering families, cold blooded murders of young people at a dance festival. Since facts upset the coherence of her arguments, she ignores them. Although when it comes to rape, she has a lot to say.

The rape allegations, Lentin argues, function not as evidence of atrocity but as a "racial boundary maintenance" mechanism — a tool for dehumanizing Palestinians and constructing Jewish women as symbols of national purity requiring protection. She cites Ali Abunimah of Electronic Intifada twice: once for the claim that the rape accusations rest on "emotional manipulation, outlandish claims, distortion, and an appeal to racist notions," and once for the claim that prosecutors found no October 7 rape victims. She cites the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs report only to immediately undercut it, and cites a Guardian piece noting no victims were identified by name.

What she does not cite is the Pramila Patten report.

Patten is the UN Special Representative on Sexual Violence in Conflict. Her March 2024 report — document A/78/773 — found "clear and convincing information" that sexual violence occurred on October 7, including rape and gang rape, and concluded there were "reasonable grounds to believe" these acts were "widespread and systematic." It is the authoritative UN document specifically addressing October 7 sexual violence, and it does not appear anywhere in Lentin's references.

Similarly, the first Israeli hostage to directly admit being sexually abused also went public in March 2024. Lentin does not want to admit it - so she ignores it. 

Compare this to her treatment of Francesca Albanese, the UN Special Rapporteur on the Palestinian Territories, whose reports Lentin cites approvingly and repeatedly as evidence of genocide. Albanese, it should be noted, is not a lawyer. Her mandate is advocacy, not adjudication. But Lentin treats her warnings as institutional validation while ignoring the findings of the UN's own investigator on sexual violence.

The pattern is precise: the UN is authoritative when it supports the genocide framing and irrelevant when it documents Hamas sexual violence. The Patten report was published a full year before she wrote this piece. . It was widely covered. Lentin cites sources from 2024 and 2025 throughout. She chose not to engage with it because its findings complicated her argument that rape discourse is a Zionist racial instrument.

Individual bad papers exist in every field. What matters here is the editorial decision to open a Palgrave handbook's substantive content with this chapter. It tells readers how the editors believe the Israeli-Arab conflict should be categorized — not merely as a political dispute, a territorial conflict, or even a humanitarian crisis, but as the paradigmatic example of racial injustice. Before a word of any other chapter is read, the framework has been established: Israel is a white supremacist racial state, Gaza is a genocide, and skepticism is denial.

University syllabi will cite this volume. Graduate students will footnote it. It will be used to establish what "the scholarly consensus" holds.

Lentin is a sophisticated scholar who knows how to insulate an argument. She disclaims legal analysis while making legal accusations. She frames rape evidence as racial discourse. She cites the UN selectively. She builds a system where every objection is pre-categorized as ideological.

But the IGF rename gives it away. So does the missing Patten report. So does citing a partisan blog twice on sexual violence while ignoring the UN's own investigator on the same subject.

Lentin's framework has one final, self-sealing feature worth naming explicitly. Once genocide is established as axiomatic, the focus shifts to its denial — and denial itself becomes the crime. Her chapter title is not just "Genocide Is Not a Metaphor" but "Reflections on Gaza and the Denial of the Crime of Genocide." The denial is the subject, not the genocide itself.

This is elegant, in a troubling way. No one disputes that Israeli officials, journalists, and supporters dispute the genocide charge. That denial is real and documented. So Lentin has constructed a framework where the one thing no one can argue against — that Israelis deny committing genocide — becomes proof of their ideology. The denial confirms the racial logic. The more vigorously you reject the charge, the deeper your complicity.

There are no facts that Lentin can accept that  would disprove her thesis. And that is evidence that her entire well-footnoted article is structurally identical to antisemitic conspiracy theory.

Academic freedom means the right to publish arguments. It does not obligate the rest of us to pretend that selective citation, unfalsifiable frameworks, and pre-verdict terminology constitute scholarship. Palgrave/Macmillan apparently disagrees.

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const

 

On February 10, Mahmoud Abbas published the draft of a new Palestinian constitution for public comment. The document was produced by a committee he appointed in August 2025, drafted over seven months with French assistance, and presented to Emmanuel Macron in Paris last November. It is being hailed as a step toward democracy and statehood.

I read all 162 articles. What I found should alarm not just Israelis, but Europeans, Christians, and anyone who believes in the possibility of Middle East peace.

Beneath a surface layer of democratic provisions — separation of powers, free elections, human rights protections — the constitution contains an interlocking architecture of provisions that, taken together, constitutionalize permanent conflict with Israel, criminalize coexistence between Israelis and Palestinians, create binding obligations that cascade through international law to nearly every country on earth, and make themselves virtually impossible to repeal.

This is not a constitution for a state that wants peace. It is a legal machine for permanent war — and Europe helped build it.

It Claims All of Israel

The constitution never defines the borders of "Palestine. "There is no reference to the 1967 lines. There is no mention of the West Bank and Gaza as the state's territory. There is no acknowledgment that any other sovereign entity exists on any part of the land.

This is a deliberate regression. The Arafat-era 2003 draft constitution explicitly defined the territory as "an indivisible unit within its borders on the eve of June 4, 1967." The 2026 draft dropped that language entirely.

Instead, the constitution anchors itself to the PLO National Covenant — which claims all of Mandatory Palestine — by stating that the PLO "continues to perform its national responsibilities according to the National Covenant." Article 25 declares the constitution and the 1988 Declaration of Independence to be "a single indivisible unit." Article 12 commits to "the unity of the land." Article 40 references "the territory of the homeland" without any geographic limitation.

The word "occupation" appears throughout the text but is never qualified — never "the occupation of the West Bank," never "the occupation since 1967." It is always just "the occupation." And the preamble characterizes it as a "colonial settlement occupation" — language that frames Israel's very existence, not just its post-1967 presence, as illegitimate.

Israel is never mentioned by name. It is simply "the occupation." Which means that this document agrees with Hamas that all of Israel is "occupied land."

It Constitutionalizes "Genocide" as Fact

The preamble asserts as foundational fact — not allegation, not claim, but constitutional premise — that "genocide continue in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank."

Article 24 then creates a constitutional duty to "pursue the perpetrators of these crimes before the judiciary." Article 69 establishes that genocide and crimes against humanity "are not subject to a statute of limitations and may not be pardoned." And Article 156 prohibits amending fundamental rights provisions — making this entire framework permanent.

Think about what this means. If genocide is constitutionally occurring across all of Gaza and the West Bank, then every Palestinian in those territories is a victim of genocide. The state has a permanent obligation to prosecute the perpetrators — meaning Israel — forever. No future government can stop it. No pardon is possible. No statute of limitations applies.

A Palestinian leader who agreed to drop genocide prosecution as part of a peace deal would be violating his own constitution.

It Makes Peace Illegal

Any peace agreement requires defined borders — the constitution has none. It requires mutual recognition — the constitution doesn't acknowledge Israel exists. It requires compromise on refugees — the constitution makes the right of return unamendable under Article 156. It requires ending criminal claims — the constitution mandates perpetual genocide prosecution. It requires accepting the other side's legitimacy — the constitution frames Israel as a criminal entity.

Article 82 explicitly prohibits treaties that violate the constitution. A Palestinian Constitutional Court faithfully applying this document would be obligated to strike down any peace treaty with Israel.

This is not an unintended consequence. It is the point. The constitution converts the political positions that Palestinian leaders have always held — non-negotiable right of return, rejection of Israel's legitimacy, claims to all of the land — and hardens them into unamendable supreme law. What was once a negotiating stance is now a constitutional straitjacket that binds all future governments.

Every Israeli Is a Target - and Europe/Canada/Australia Are The Enforcers

Israel has universal conscription. Virtually every Jewish Israeli adult is an IDF veteran. The constitution mandates prosecution of genocide perpetrators with no statute of limitations. Connect the dots: every Israeli who ever served in the IDF — as a combat soldier, a medic, a cook, a clerk, whether in Gaza or the West Bank, and probably even desk jobs in Israel — is a presumptive war criminal under this framework.

This isn't limited to Palestinian courts. Palestine has been a member of the International Criminal Court since 2015. The constitution's mandate to pursue perpetrators "before the judiciary" encompasses every available legal forum. The ICC has already demonstrated its willingness to issue warrants against Israeli leaders.

But now it applies to hundreds of thousands of Israelis.

The constitution creates a permanent obligation to file cases. The ICC processes them. And under Article 86 of the Rome Statute, every member state — virtually all of Europe, Canada, Australia, Japan — is legally obligated to cooperate with ICC warrants, including executing arrests.

An Israeli backpacker in Paris. A tech executive in London. A professor in Brussels. A grandmother in Toronto. If they ever served in the IDF, they are all subject to arrest by countries that are treaty-bound to enforce warrants generated by a constitutional machine that can never be switched off. And there are plenty of Israel haters who have already shown that they want to create lists of Israelis in their countries for exactly this reason, to charge them with "genocide."

The practical burden on Rome Statute member states would be immense. Each ICC warrant must be entered into border control databases — Interpol, the EU's Schengen Information System, and national immigration systems. Each arrest requires a domestic judicial surrender proceeding, with the detained person entitled to legal representation, a hearing, and the right to appeal. Each case demands the involvement of ministries of justice, prosecutors, courts, police, and diplomatic channels. These systems are designed to handle a few cases at a time. A constitutionally-mandated campaign generating thousands of warrant requests against citizens of a single country would overwhelm the administrative, judicial, and diplomatic infrastructure of every cooperating state. European, Canadian, and Australian governments would face a choice: allow their legal systems to be consumed by an endless stream of cases they never anticipated, or refuse to comply with their own treaty obligations — exposing themselves to legal challenges from Palestinian authorities and human rights organizations for non-compliance. 

The constitution's drafters have engineered a system in which the cost of compliance is paralysis and the cost of non-compliance is legal liability. The world has to pay the price. 

The countries that recognized Palestine and helped draft this constitution would be legally obligated to enforce the consequences of what they built. 

It Criminalizes Coexistence

The implications extend to every form of Israeli-Palestinian cooperation. Any Israeli on Palestinian territory — which, under this constitution, means any territory — is a presumptive genocide perpetrator on Palestinian soil. This means:

Israelis driving through the West Bank to reach Jordan could be arrested in transit. Israeli tourists visiting Bethlehem or Jericho would be subject to detention. Israeli academics visiting Palestinian universities, Israeli doctors volunteering at Palestinian clinics, Israeli businesspeople meeting Palestinian partners — all of them are IDF veterans on the soil of a state constitutionally mandated to prosecute them.

The grassroots peace organizations that bring Israelis and Palestinians together — Seeds of Peace, the Parents Circle, Kids4Peace — become constitutionally untenable. An Israeli mother at a joint dialogue is a citizen of the genocide state. A Palestinian mother who meets her is normalizing relations with her people's genocide perpetrator.

And the Palestinians who participate in these programs? They face their own constitutional jeopardy. If Israel is constitutionally a genocidal colonial entity, then cooperating with Israelis can be characterized as normalizing genocide. Article 69 punishes "conspiracy against the unity and integrity of the territory of the State of Palestine." Article 18 frames defense of the homeland as "a sacred duty." Palestinian academics collaborating with Israeli colleagues, Palestinian doctors training in Israeli hospitals, Palestinian workers employed by Israeli businesses, Palestinian peace activists who believe in coexistence — all of them risk being cast as traitors to a constitutional order that demands rejection of everything Israeli.

The constitution doesn't just prevent peace between governments. It criminalizes peace between people.

It Erases Judaism and Downgrades Christianity

The 2003 Basic Law, currently in force, protects "all other heavenly religions" — a phrase that implicitly includes Judaism. The Arafat-era 2003 draft constitution explicitly guaranteed "sanctity and respect" to "Christianity and all other monotheistic religions" and protected religious worship sites for "followers of all monotheistic religions."

The 2026 draft strips all of this away. Article 4 mentions only Christianity — and downgrades it from "sanctity and respect" to the vague formulation that it "has its status" and its followers' "rights are respected." Judaism is not mentioned once in the entire document, not even as a "heavenly religion."

Which means that the Palestinian constitution would allow dismantling every synagogue and Jewish holy place in Jerusalem and elsewhere. 

Article 3 protects only "Islamic and Christian sanctities" in Jerusalem. Jewish sanctities — the Western Wall, the Temple Mount, the Mount of Olives — receive no mention and no protection. The same applies to Jewish holy sites throughout the claimed territory: the Cave of the Patriarchs in Hebron, Rachel's Tomb in Bethlehem, Joseph's Tomb in Nablus. Under this constitution, Israeli administration of any of these sites is an illegal alteration of the land's "character and historical identity" (Article 3). Jewish worship there takes place under the authority of an entity the constitution identifies as a genocidal occupier. And any Jews who want to visit these sites are subject to arrest and prosecution as participating in genocide.

Islamic Sharia is established as "a primary source for legislation." Christians will live under a legal system whose primary source is the religious law of another faith, with only the vague assurance that their "rights are respected." This is a big step backwards from previous Palestinian documents.

France — the country of laïcité — helped draft a constitution more Islamic supremacist than anything Arafat proposed.

The PLO and the State: Sovereignty Without Accountability

The Palestinian Authority has always been subordinate to the Palestine Liberation Organization. The PA handles day-to-day governance — education, health, policing, tax collection — but political decisions are made by the PLO Executive Committee, an unelected, self-perpetuating body. Mahmoud Abbas holds both positions simultaneously, as PLO Chairman and PA President, which obscures the fact that these are separate institutions with the PLO firmly on top.

The new constitution does not change this hierarchy. It formalizes it.

The constitution creates an elaborate democratic architecture: a directly elected president limited to two five-year terms, a prime minister and cabinet accountable to parliament, a House of Representatives as the sole legislative authority, an independent judiciary, and a Constitutional Court with binding authority over constitutional interpretation. Chapters III through VII read like the framework of a serious parliamentary democracy. It all sounds impressive, and it seems to be dazzling the Europeans who want to see a modern Palestinian state.

But above all of it sits the PLO, untouched. 

Article 11 declares that the establishment of the state "does not diminish" the PLO's status. The preamble specifies that the PLO retains supremacy "until the achievement of full national independence and the realization of inalienable rights, primarily the right of return" and that it "continues to perform its national responsibilities according to the National Covenant." 

Which means that the PLO makes all the important decisions until Israel is destroyed, since Israel will never allow the "right of return."

The constitution defines in meticulous detail who controls the state. It never defines who controls the PLO. The PLO operates under its own charter, which the state has no authority to amend. The relationship is one-directional: the constitution protects the PLO from the state, but nothing protects the state from the PLO.

The constitution also erases the legal framework that has governed Israeli-Palestinian relations for three decades. Oslo is never mentioned and the agreements that the PLO and PA made over the past 30 years are not formalized.  The letters of mutual recognition are never referenced. Israel is never named. This is a deliberate regression: the 2003 Basic Law explicitly referenced "the interim self-governing arrangements resulting from the Israeli-Palestinian agreement." The new constitution replaces that foundation entirely, grounding itself instead in the 1988 Declaration of Independence and the PLO National Covenant — documents that predate and are incompatible with mutual recognition.

Nor does the constitution renounce armed resistance. Article 154 prohibits military formations outside the state's security forces, but Article 18 declares defense of the homeland and "the safety of its land" a "sacred duty," and the preamble celebrates "the continuous Palestinian struggle that has never ceased" against "colonial settlement occupation." More fundamentally, because the PLO operates under its own charter rather than under the constitution, the state's restrictions on armed groups do not bind the PLO or its constituent factions. Fatah's longstanding position that armed resistance remains legitimate is a PLO matter, not a state matter, and nothing in this constitution touches it.

In fact, Mahmoud Abbas told Macron in the  November 2025 press conference  that "we want a democratic, unarmed state committed to the rule of law, transparency, justice, pluralism and the rotation of power." The constitution never mentions demilitarization. 

The result is a structure in which Palestinians can vote for a president and a parliament, but the body that holds ultimate political authority — the body that determines the national position on borders, refugees, Jerusalem, and relations with Israel — answers to no electorate, is governed by a document that rejects Israel's existence, has erased all prior commitments to peace, and retains the right to pursue armed struggle.

This is all a direct result of recognizing "Palestine" - and the French directly helped

Here is the timeline that European capitals do not want to discuss.

In June 2025, Abbas wrote to Macron promising reforms — condemning October 7, pledging to reform textbooks to remove hate speech, committing to demilitarize, accepting elections. Macron, satisfied, announced in July that France would recognize Palestine in September. Other European nations followed.

On August 18 — three and a half weeks after Macron's announcement, with recognition locked in — Abbas issued the decree establishing the constitution drafting committee.

In September, France, the UK, Canada, Australia, Belgium, and others formally recognized Palestine at the UN General Assembly, launching the "Global Alliance for the Implementation of the Two-State Solution."

In November, Macron hosted Abbas in Paris, announced a joint French-Palestinian committee to help finalize the constitution, and pledged €100 million in aid. Abbas told Macron he wanted "a democratic, unarmed state committed to the rule of law."

In February 2026, the constitution was published. It mandates perpetual legal warfare against Israel, claims all the land, defines Israel as a criminal entity, erases Judaism, downgrades Christianity, and makes peace unconstitutional.

Abbas told Europe exactly what it wanted to hear. Then he drafted the opposite.

Every state that recognized "Palestine" used the reasoning that somehow this would advance a peaceful two state solution that everyone knows is the only way forward. Mahmoud Abbas smiled at them, promised reforms, and spat in their faces with a constitution that cannot ever allow peace or even co-existence with Israel. 

Why This Cannot Be Fixed

The constitution is designed to be self-protecting. Article 156 prohibits amendment of fundamental rights provisions — which is exactly where the most problematic provisions are embedded. The right of return, the genocide prosecution mandate, and the criminal law framework all sit within the protected zone.

A Constitutional Court with binding authority (Article 143) enforces these provisions against all state institutions. Even a peace-seeking government with moderate judges would find that honest jurisprudence requires striking down peace measures that conflict with unamendable text.

The PLO National Covenant is incorporated by reference, and the preamble is declared inseparable from the constitution. The genocide premise — once embedded as constitutional fact — poisons every possible avenue of coexistence: you cannot negotiate, trade, share infrastructure, cooperate, or even talk with your genocide perpetrator.

The drafters didn't accidentally create these interlocking traps. They engineered them.

---

Conclusion: A Constitution for Destruction, Not Construction

The 2026 draft constitution answers a question that has defined the Israeli-Palestinian conflict for decades: does the Palestinian leadership want to build a state, or destroy one?

The drafting of a constitution is the moment when a national movement reveals its true purpose. It is the moment you define the territory you intend to govern, establish relations with your neighbors, create legal frameworks for economic development and foreign investment, and build institutions designed to deliver services to your citizens. A constitution is a declaration to the world: we are ready to govern.

The 2026 constitution does none of this.

It defines no territory to govern. It establishes no framework for relations with the only neighbor its economy depends on. It creates no legal basis for the thousands of commercial relationships that already exist between Palestinian and Israeli businesses. It provides no mechanism for diplomatic recognition of the state next door — or any acknowledgment that the state next door exists.

Instead, every major structural choice in the document points outward — toward Israel, toward the ICC, toward international legal warfare — rather than inward, toward the actual work of building and running a country. It constitutionalizes victimhood rather than sovereignty. It creates obligations to pursue enemies rather than serve citizens. It builds legal machinery for prosecution, not for governance. The democratic architecture is real, but it is a shell around a weapon, not a government.

The PLO superstructure is the clearest tell. When a liberation movement achieves statehood, it absorbs itself into the state's institutions. The ANC became South Africa's governing party within a constitutional framework. SWAPO became Namibia's government. The state replaced the movement. This constitution does the opposite: it permanently elevates the liberation movement above the state, operating under its own unreformed charter, answerable to no electorate, and constitutionally immune from the state's authority. That is the choice you make when the struggle is not a phase you are transitioning out of but the permanent purpose of the enterprise.

This is not a constitution for a state. It is a constitution against a state — the one next door.

Abbas told Macron he wanted "a democratic, unarmed state committed to the rule of law." What he produced is a legal architecture for permanent war, designed to be irreversible, built with European money and diplomatic support, and aimed not at governing Palestinians but at dismantling Israel through the international legal system.

This draft constitution proves, as clearly as possible, that the Palestinians never wanted to build a state, but to destroy one. 

Every government that recognized the "State of Palestine" in the hope it would bring peace should be outraged at how they have been manipulated and lied to. And they should make it clear to Mahmoud Abbas that their recognition was conditional - and since the Palestinians have spit on those conditions, the recognitions are null and void. 

The full text of the Draft Constitution of the State of Palestine (February 2026), in unofficial English translation, is available at: https://constitutionnet.org/sites/default/files/2026-02/2026.02%20-%20Draft%20constitution%20%28English%29.pdf

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alban

 When UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese gave a speech at the Al Jazeera Forum recently, clips were circulated indicating she called Israel the "common enemy" of humanity.

She and her defenders then said that in context, she was talking about a "system", not about Israel.

So let's look at what she actually and her clarification, and using only her words and their logic, we can see exactly what she meant without any hand-waving. 

 Here is the entire speech and transcript:

We have been spending the last two years looking at the planning and making of a genocide. And the genocide is not over. The genocide as the intentional destruction of a group as such is clearly unveiled. Now it's been in the air for a long time and now it's a full display.  It's been difficult to report the genocide. Al Jazeera knows better than anyone else in the media realm, because of all the losses, it does suffer as a media company.

But no other people knows it better than the Palestinian themselves.  The Palestinians have continued to narrate the deluge of conscience that fell upon them relentlessly.

And this is a challenge, the fact that instead of stopping Israel, most of the world has armed [it],  giving it political excuses, political sheltering, economic and financial support, this is a challenge. The fact that most of the media in the Western world has been amplifying the pro-apartheid, the genocidal narrative is a challenge.  And at the same time, here also lays the opportunity.

 Because if international law has been stabbed in the heart, it's also true that never before the global community has seen the challenges that we all face.  We would not control large amounts of financial capitals, algorithms and weapons. We now see that we, as a humanity, have a common enemy.

 And freedoms, the respect of fundamental freedoms, is the last peaceful toolbox that we have to regain our freedom. But we need to stand up. We need to do the right thing, all of us in our individual sphere,  being us lawyers, journalists, educators, students, ordinary citizens.

At home, we all have a role to play.  And this role is changing our habits. From what we choose to buy, to consume, to read, to how we stand in front of power, we need to be able to speak up.

We need to have the strength to look at each other and see our brothers and sisters, and see allies in them.  And in this respect, I think the Al Jazeera has a bigger challenge than others, because it is to stay true through its core values, through to the mission that has made it known around the world its ability to produce true facts and march toward justice with them in their hands.  

I do believe that Palestine will be free. I do believe that we will all be free, because too much human rights conscience is rooted in today's world after 80 years of preaching and teaching human rights.  But we need to, we need to act. And the time is now. So, for a 26th of full commitment toward accountability and justice.

Francesca Albanese tried to clarify her “common enemy of humanity” remark by saying she wasn’t talking about Israel itself. She meant “the system that enabled the genocide in Palestine – the financial capital that funds it, the algorithms that obscure it, and the weapons that enable it.”

But that clarification does not soften anything. It actually demonizes Israel more. 

Her whole speech is built on one claim: Israel is committing genocide. Everything else in the speech hangs off that. The “arming,” the “political shelter,” the “media amplification,” the “international law stabbed in the heart” – all of it is presented as support for Israel’s alleged crime.  

So when she says the system that enables this is the “enemy of humanity,” she is not downgrading Israel’s role. She is building a hierarchy:

• Israel is the actor committing the alleged genocide.

• The system that enables Israel is the enemy of humanity.

• And anyone who will not join the indictment is implicated as part of that system.

The word “system” does not detract from the claim that Israel is uniquely evil. It is the opposite. It turns Israel into the paradigm of evil and then expands the blast radius outward to include everyone who refuses to treat Israel that way.

In short, if the system that allows Israel to exist is an enemy of humanity, all the more so is Israel itself. Calling the enablers “the enemy of humanity” does not make Israel less of an enemy. It makes Israel, logically, the central enemy of humanity — and it enlarges the category of "enemies of humanity" to include anyone who doesn’t treat Israel as a pariah - Americans, British, French, even her own Italian government. 

So reading her own words - and her explanation - does not make her less of an antisemite. It proves it. 

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The Shelved Report That Exposes HRW's Antisemitism

 Two senior Human Rights Watch staff members, Omar Shakir and Milena Ansari, resigned last month over the organization's decision to shelve a report concluding that Israel's refusal to allow Palestinian "refugees" and their descendants to "return" constitutes a crime against humanity. The New York Times and other outlets are framing this as a story about HRW's internal politics and the courage of principled researchers.

They're missing the real story: the report's underlying logic reveals how accusations against Israel consistently rely on assuming Jewish evil from the outset—and that assumption is itself antisemitic.

While the report hasn't been published, the NYT article provides enough detail to reconstruct HRW's likely legal argument. The dispute centers on "whether there is a solid legal basis for the sweeping determination that denying the right of return to a particular location causes a level of suffering that rises to a crime against humanity."

Under the Rome Statute, crimes against humanity require proof that acts were committed "as part of a widespread or systematic attack directed against any civilian population, with knowledge of the attack." 

Here are the crimes against humanity listed in the Rome Statute:

(a) Murder;
(b) Extermination;
(c) Enslavement;
(d) Deportation or forcible transfer of population;
(e) Imprisonment or other severe deprivation of physical liberty in violation of fundamental rules of international law;
(f) Torture;
(g) Rape, sexual slavery, enforced prostitution, forced pregnancy, enforced sterilization, or any other form of sexual violence of comparable gravity;
(h) Persecution against any identifiable group or collectivity on political, racial, national, ethnic, cultural, religious, gender
 (j) Apartheid;

How on Earth can a nation's immigration policy be put in the same category as these crimes? How can it be considered an "attack" at all, which is the very definition of a crime against humanity? 

It cannot - but the HRW report almost certainly relies on an additional item listed in the Rome Statute:

(k) Other inhumane acts of a similar character intentionally causing great suffering, or serious injury to body or to mental or physical health.

Notice what's embedded both in that formulation as well as in the general definition of crimes against humanity: intentionality. 

Let's be explicit about what HRW's theory requires: Israel's immigration policy must be intentionally designed to cause great suffering to Palestinians. No nation on Earth allows anyone to become a citizen without fitting some criteria, and Israel's is no more onerous than that of most other countries. As a Jewish state, it favors Jews - but millions of people became citizens of European states without even being residents because of their ethnic ties. Germany's Spätaussiedler program, Hungary's citizenship-by-descent law, and Ireland's generous policies for those with Irish grandparents are all considered legitimate expressions of national identity. 

Only when Israel does that same is it considered an active act of aggression against another group of people specifically to cause suffering. HRW is arguing that Israel's immigration policy - denying entry to descendants of people who left in 1948, most of whom have never lived in Israel - belongs in the company of extermination and mass rape.. That standard immigration controls exercised by every state somehow constitute "intentionally causing great suffering" comparable to murder, torture, and enslavement.

We aren't even getting into the discussion of Israel's security needs that prompted the policy not to allow Arabs who fled in 1948, hoping for a quick defeat of Israel, to return. Nor about how the UN resolution that is misread to give a "right" to return also specifies that the people must be willing to live in peace, a requirement that was never met. 

The Arab world has been clear from the start that their insistence on "return" is a means to destroy Israel. Muhammad Salah al-Din Bey, Foreign Minister of Egypt, said in 1949, "It is well-known and understood that the Arabs, in demanding the return of the refugees to Palestine, mean their return as masters of the Homeland… they mean the liquidation of the State of Israel."

Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser was equally explicit. In 1961 he stated that Arab demands meant "the destruction of the State of Israel." Even more directly, Nasser declared: "If the refugees return to Israel – Israel will cease to exist." Arab leaders weren't hiding their intent - the "right of return" was always a demographic weapon to eliminate the Jewish state

HRW is not advocating human rights for Palestinian Arabs. It is demanding the destruction of Israel.

The  assumption of malicious intent when Israel is doing what every other nation does is not limited to this report.   It's the common thread running through every major accusation against Israel:

"Genocide": Amnesty International's recent report claims Israel commits genocide in Gaza. But genocide requires "intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group." If Israel's intent is to destroy Hamas then the entire argument falls apart - but Amnesty embedded the result claiming intent for genocide into the assumption. The accusation assumes the worst possible motive while ignoring the obvious alternative: self-defense against a terrorist organization that openly seeks Israel's destruction.

"Apartheid": Multiple NGO reports claim Israel practices apartheid. But apartheid requires intent "to maintain [a] regime of systematic oppression and domination." Israel's laws enshrining equality for its Arab citizens demolishes the "intent" requirement. As I've documented, Amnesty invented its own definition of apartheid to reach this conclusion.

"Illegal settlements": The portrayal of Israeli communities in the West Bank assumes they exist to "steal land" or "oppress Palestinians"—not for security, not because Jews have historical and legal claims to the territory, not because successive Arab rejections of peace offers left the status unresolved.

In every case, the methodology is identical:

1. Assume Israeli Jews act from uniquely malicious motives
2. Ignore obvious alternative explanations (security, self-defense, standard state practice)
3. Use that assumption of evil intent to "prove" the predetermined conclusion
4. Create legal standards that apply only when you've assumed malicious intent from the start

In this case, it is crystal clear that the HRW report was written with the conclusion first, and the legal justification shoe-horned in afterwards. (Which is similar to Amnesty's report which was referred to internally as the "genocide" report while it was being written.) 

This isn't just bias. It's a modern variant of an ancient libel.

The classical blood libel assumed Jews murdered Christian children for ritual purposes. The modern version assumes Jews design state policies specifically to maximize gentile suffering. The structure is identical: attribute uniquely evil motivations to Jews, dismiss obvious innocent explanations, use the assumption to "prove" extraordinary Jewish wickedness.

When you assume a Jewish state operates from fundamentally different and malicious motives than other states, you're not applying universal standards. You're applying a Jewish exception. And when that exception consistently assumes the worst possible intent while ignoring obvious alternatives, it reveals the prejudice driving the analysis.

The antisemitism becomes even clearer when you examine how Arab states treat the exact same Palestinian population.

Israel's immigration policies have been in place since 1948. There is no active oppression in not allowing Arabs to "return" to a state that almost none of them have ever lived. 

But Arab nations that have hosted Palestinian Arabs since 1948 have refused to give them citizenship for over 75 years. And this is a deliberate policy - the Arab League says that Arabs can become citizens of other Arab countries except for Palestinians.

Under HRW's own logic - that denying people citizenship causes 'great suffering' - this active, ongoing discrimination against actual residents would far more clearly constitute a crime against humanity than Israel's standard immigration policy. History has shown that Palestinians want to become citizens of Arab countries if they could, and the rare times that brief windows opened to allow some of them to be naturalized they enthusiastically took advantage of that. The 1951 Refugee Convention says, "The Contracting States shall as far as possible facilitate the assimilation and naturalization of refugees" and every Arab state has flouted that. (Even Jordan, which naturalized the West Bank Palestinians in 1951, has not done the same for Gazans who went to Jordan after the Six Day War; they are still living in camps without access to state services.) 

Don't hold your breath for HRW to accuse Lebanon, which doesn't even allow Palestinians to purchase land and forces them to live in overcrowded camps, of "crimes against humanity." But if HRW wasn't institutionally antisemitic and truly believed that keeping Palestinians stateless is a crime, that is exactly what they would do. 

Even Kenneth Roth, HRW's executive director from 1993 to 2022, called this "a novel legal theory that was unsupported by the facts and law." When Kenneth Roth - whose anti-Israel bias has been extensively documented - can't defend your reasoning, you've revealed the prejudice underlying it.

Interestingly, HRW and Amnesty claimed that the "right to return" is a legal requirement over 20 years ago, using a different argument. It was based on a purposeful misreading of  the Nottebohm ICJ case. They quote-mined an ICJ decision about citizenship disputes to mean the opposite of what it says - because they started with the conclusion that Israel must be violating international law and worked backwards, just as they have done countless times since. Elevating the argument to the even more absurd "crime against humanity" shows far more about HRW than about Israel. 

The report was led by Omar Shakir, HRW's Israel-Palestine director for nearly a decade. Shakir has a documented history of opposing Israel's existence dating to his college years. HRW hired him knowing this - they wanted someone who would assume the worst about Israel.

And that's precisely what this report represents: start with the assumption that Israeli Jews are uniquely evil, construct a legal theory that only works if you maintain that assumption, apply it only to Israel while exempting states engaged in far worse conduct.

The report may be shelved, but the effort to write it reveals the antisemitism embedded in HRW's institutional approach: assume Jewish malice, ignore alternative explanations, use that assumption to prove predetermined conclusions, and call it "human rights research."

When your entire analytical framework depends on assuming Jews act from uniquely evil motives, you're not doing legal analysis. You're perpetuating an ancient prejudice in modern legal language.

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sittah

 Coming soon, to Columbia University:

"A State of Passion" is about Dr. Ghassan Abu Sittah, a British-Arab plastic surgeon who is described as "a face of Palestinian resistance" from his activities in Gaza during wartime.

The film will not discuss Abu Sittah's penchant for making up lies about Israel. Nor will it discuss his antisemitism. 

During the Gaza war, for example, Abu Sittah claims that he - and he alone - saw photographs taken by Al Jazeera that he says proved that Israeli doctors "expertly" removed organs from living Palestinian prisoners. This is a blood libel; it is absurd to think that any such photographs exist yet they weren't publicized where doctors worldwide could confirm it. Al Jazeera colluded with Abu Sittah - because they know that he will say anything to condemn Israel, no matter how far from the truth it might be.

He has a history of doing exactly that.

I found an Arabic language interview where he claimed that Israel had targeted every Palestinian Red Crescent hospital in the first days of the 1982 Lebanon war. 

It was a lie.

He further claimed that Ben Gurion said "I cannot bear to think that we will have to live in the same country as these people." Another lie.

He further alleged that when Israel arrested Shifa hospital director Dr. Mohammed Abu Salmiya, "They broke his arms. They made him walk on all fours with a chain around his neck. They made him eat from a plate on the floor in front of the other doctors, because he refused to go on TV and say that the Israelis were right."

Salmiya himself never made any such claims when he was released and gave a press conference, and his arms were clearly not broken.  It was a lie.

Abu Sittah also is a fan of terrorists who attack Jews, retweeting one who said  “We congratulate our brothers in Hamas and our comrades in the Popular Front on the anniversary of their inception.”

He also praised the PFLP terrorist who bombed a cinema in Tel Aviv in December 1974, killing two. 

Beyond his lies and love of murderers, Abu Sittah is also a rabid Jew hater. 

He has repeatedly compared Israel to Nazi Germany, for example calling Gaza a "Final Solution." 

Abu Sittah also falsely claimed that 66% of Israelis are allergic to olive tree pollen, linking to a study that says no such thing. It was only looking at people who already had allergies and who lived near olive groves. Allergies are correlated with exposure. Lebanese people with allergies are more likely to be allergic to cedar and cypress pollen. 

When a doctor misrepresents a medical paper to push an antisemitic theory, it casts doubt on his competence as an activist as well as his medical credentials. 

Abu Sittah is not a hero. He is a contemptible, antisemitic terror supporter. 

Maybe Jews of New York should take a page from Abu Sittah's fans and hold a protest outside the Lenfest Center for the Arts on February 10. There is an excellent plaza right in front tailor made for people chanting and holding signs. Call the media ahead of time asking for comments from the Center for Palestine Studies, sponsoring the event, asking them if they support a doctor who praises terrorists and spins antisemitic conspiracy theories. 

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sabsabi

 

A year ago, Australia was in an uproar when the government decided not to send a work by a Lebanese Australian artist, Khaled Sabsabi, to the to represent the country at the 2026 Venice Biennale, after it was revealed that he had created pro-terrorist video artwork installations.

Two of them are shown here. One from 2007, "You,"  repeatedly portrays videos of former Hezbollah terror leader Hassan Nasrallah as angelic figures of light, which the Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA) in Sydney said "suggest divine illumination."

The other shows the planes crashing into the World Trade Center and then shows President Bush saying in a stutter, "Thank you very much," which is what Sabsabi named the installation. 

These pieces are not "ambiguous" as the narrator in the videos claims. Sabsabi himself makes that clear even as he ingenuously says that they are about "humanity."

Thousands of Australian artists signed an open letter protesting that this decision was an assault on artistic freedom. 

Yet later in 2025, tens of thousands of artists wrote a letter to the same Venice Beinnale insisting that the Israeli pavilion at the show be closed down: "We demand that the Biennale withdraws any offer to platform a genocidal state."

Australia's Jewish Independent looked at the signatures of both letters and found that over 200 of the same artists protesting censoring Australia platforming a pro-terror artist also supported censoring every Israeli artist.

In fact, Khaled Sabsabi himself signed the letter supporting censoring Israel's exhibit.

The Israeli art piece by Ruth Patir was not about celebrating war or terror. It reimagined fertility goddesses as real life mothers.

Jewish artists in Australia have been under siege. 600 Jewish creatives were doxxed, and several of them have been victims of discrimination in the art world just because they were Jewish. As the newspaper notes:

The Jewish Independent knows of several shocking individual cases including an established artist dropped by a gallery that had represented her for years; a young gallery worker who left her job after being confronted with antisemitic stereotypes; and an emerging artist with a recognisably Jewish family name who went from having several projects a year accepted to having every application rejected since October 7. 

The situation is so dire that sculptor Nina Sanadze has founded Goldstone Gallery for the express purpose of platforming artists cancelled for political reasons, predominantly Jewish and Israeli artists.

We see the same hypocrisy in the academic world every day, where pro-terror and even antisemitic positions are justified as freedom of expression but any pro-Zionist voices are silenced for supposedly moral reasons. 

But here we have a list of people who sign their names to diametrically opposed petitions that prove their own hypocrisy. 

(h/t Jill)

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